An Old Crush Takes a Picture in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples

An Old Crush Takes a Picture in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples

There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse. —Sappho

and sends it to you via Facebook message.
He tells you that the woman it depicts
isn't Sappho, despite the fresco's reputation,
and you later read that this woman might not
even be a poet, that what she is writing
with the stylus she holds to her lips might
be household accounts. But Sappho or not,
you tell him you would like to write a poem
about this woman living in paint on lime
plaster—since before the funeral of volcanic ash—
first in Pompeii and now in Naples, but
what you're already writing in your head
is this poem, which is about something else.

You haven't seen that crush in twenty-five
years, don't even remember where the last time
might have been, but now you sometimes chat
online late into the night. You wonder what
the woman in the fresco has been writing about
for all of these centuries, practice that same
impartial gaze as you compose your own
lines. You wonder if a picture exists of you
writing—staring off into the distance, following
the footsteps of words—and if it does, what line
you are trapped in the middle of forever,
what line might still hold endless
possibilities and yet be going nowhere.